How To Solve The Biggest Problems With Team Collaboration

Teamwork has always been a challenge for individuals. As teams grow, collaborating becomes more complex and steps become less clear. There is more to remember to do, more opinions to ask for, more clarifications to run by the others. The individual cannot act alone. Arranging these steps in a logical order in a non-invasive way is the key to a smoothly-functioning team. Getting the workflow right will also reduce stress and anxiety of those on the team, leading to more happiness and the ability to feel and be more productive. We have many technologies that partially solve workflow issues, but non is as comprehensive and intuitive for teams as Twoodo.

There are many websites and companies out there offering team collaboration tools or social collaboration solutions. The sheer amount proves that something still isn’t quite right. No-one has truly cracked the nut yet. Although the benefits of using a social collaboration platform are indisputable, the problem is finding the right tool and getting your team to adopt it. Many existing solutions are only aimed at tracking tasks (todo lists, shares task lists, task management apps), but that’s just adding another tool to your belt. Others are only for communicating (chat tools, messaging tools) – but that’s adding an extra tool on top of your email. Some do both, but they forget that we are human beings that need to be wooed into doing something – they forget that you can’t separate communication from tasks. Let’s go over some of biggest pains that teams have with adopting social collaboration tools and how to overcome them.

I don’t want to change my habits

From the many customer interviews we’ve carried out with small and large companies alike, by far the biggest perceived pain of collaboration tools is that they force you to learn yet another “way of working”. Developing new habits is a pain. If somehow you manage to convince yourself that the new tool you’ve found is the solution you’ve always been looking for, then unfortunately a second barrier kicks in. You need to change the habits of everyone on your team, get them to join you on this new application. When we launched the private beta version of Twoodo we saw waves of people to whom this was happening. We would get one person on the team to fall in love with the Twoodo system, two to follow him in adopting the tool but then all would fall apart when it came to convincing one or two other reticent colleagues. The general statistic we found tended to be the same throughout all teams, 75% were willing to adopt, the remaining unwilling 25% spoiled it for the rest of them. Management styles tend to be much more relaxed today. “If the team doesn’t adopt the tool, I’m not going to force them”.

We built the tool for people like you, who want to lead the way to enlightenment and more effective collaboration. This is why we engineered Twoodo in a way where you can collaborate with your team (or third parties) using Twoodo without forcing them or needing them to use it too! How beautiful is that? We achieved this by integrating email. You can send and track all your messages from Twoodo and the recipients get a clear, actionable, organized message. Chances are, the people you work with just need to fall in love with it in their own time.

With Email integration we’ve made it super simple to include people via their email into one of your work teams.

Every time you post a message, task, note, vote, question or document, Twoodo users will receive it on their Twoodo dashboard and non-users will receive it via email. When non-users hit “reply” from their email client they’ll be able to take part in the conversation. When you send them a todo, vote or question they’ll be able to mark as done, vote or reply from the comfort of their email client. Non-Twoodo-users can keep their habits untouched and you can efficiently track, save, store all your communications and documents with your team.

New tools are complicated to use

When you use most collaboration tools, our research shows that it takes an average of eight steps to enter a task for someone! EIGHT! So even after you’ve got your team using a new tool, it still takes longer than sending an email. No wonder people have a hard time adapting to “collaboration tools”.

First you need to have the task at hand…

then go to the right project/team that you want to communicate with…

then you type your task…

then you set an assignee with your mouse…

then you set the date…

then set the importance…

and voila! Your task is in the system.

We have a strong belief that using a collaboration tool should feel natural, just like talking, and shouldn’t take eight steps.

Adding hashtags is super fast and you don’t need to be a power user, just a little web savvy. Most importantly it follows your train of thought – you don’t need to go to a special project/team page to write the message. You just write it and tag it, give it an action, assign it to someone, in whatever order your brain gives you the information in. Plain and simple.

I don’t want tasks and orders shouted at me

I don’t see myself like a computer than can be programmed to execute actions. I need to be coaxed into doing something, and I think you are probably similar. A mistake that I think most collaboration tools do is separate the conversations, the chit-chat from the actions or to-dos. You end up finding yourself with a pile of tasks that you need to execute without feeling like you contributed. They might not even be clear tasks. So it’s back to your email to clarify it all. That just doesn’t feel right. These tools make you have your conversations on one side and your actions on another.

We don’t see it that way. It’s a bit like Confucius said: “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” We believe that great companies happen because of the team, because they all have a common objective, and that great things are achieved by working together.

The very core of Twoodo is not actions, it’s collaboration with your team and we empower you to have a conversation naturally, just like you would face to face. We allow you to make that conversation evolve into action, not the other way around. We’re turning your conversations into actions.

And if you’re still asking yourself “But what’s the added value?”

Save time & execute fast (add a #todo in just one sentence, not 8 steps)